You can hear the wall of sound from down the cobbled lane. That familiar
melody, sampled by Puccini from a Chinese music box and long associated in
English minds with football and Pavarotti, exerts its uniquely powerful hold
in the sunny open air. This is Three Mill Island, a quaintly moated studio
complex in the East End of London where outsize operas and musicals are
knocked into shape. For outsize sound, nothing quite compares to the choral
conclusion of Turandot now resonating climactically through an open
warehouse door. I stand and watch the singers’ backs. Soon they stop and
file out in clusters for a spot of lunch. Thus, in muted high-street threads
and effulgent Renaissance hair, is the distinctive figure of Rupert Goold
revealed.
There can be no clearer measure of a theatre director’s arrival than having
such forces to play with. And no director has arrived in recent years like
Goold. Only four years ago, he was running a theatre in Northampton. In
2007, his Macbeth with Patrick Stewart went all the way from Chichester to
Broadway. His joyous staging of Oliver! continues to cram them in at the
Palladium. Meanwhile, his reimagining of Pirandello’s Six Characters in
Search of an Author is off on tour. But more than anything, it’s Enron, now
utterly sold out at the Royal Court and heading in January for the West End,
that has hauled Goold into a new stratosphere. The tale of the biggest fraud
in history, perpetrated by a trio of hubristic men in Texas on the
financiers of Wall Street, is a case of right play, right time, but, most of
all, right director.
And now, to underline all of the above, comes his debut with English National
Opera. It involves a quantum shift for any theatre director. Goold is having
to get used to powersharing — with conductor, chorus master, choreographer —
but also to new rhythms. When the shortish rehearsal period comes to an end,
there is one dress rehearsal, a break of four days and then a first preview,
which is also the press night. “That’s pretty scary,” Goold concedes.
Has anyone ever looked less scared? The allotted slot for talking was meant to
be snatched during a quick lunch break, but Goold talks contentedly for a
full hour while munching on a sandwich and crisps. Apart from that hair,
nothing seems overtly directorial about him. The voice is a warm déclassé
baritone, with trace elements of posh. The confident manner may quietly
suggest privately educated entitlement. But he has earned every plaudit.
No director in recent years has worked so many shifts. His rate of
productivity has found him occasionally flying by the seat of his pants.
Macbeth may have thrilled them, but critics rounded on last year’s
half-baked King Lear, a touring production that even he concedes may have
been a case of biting off more than he could chew. “Around that period, I
was working too much,” he says. “I know it was a very flawed piece of work,
but there were elements that I really loved. Maybe you love your ugliest
child.”
It is a function of Goold’s tolerance of risk that Enron has had its launch
this summer. He and his company, Headlong, had been developing the idea with
the playwright Lucy Prebble for three years. They knew they were in for the
long haul when she submitted her first draft. “Other writers go, ‘I might do
another draft’ or ‘That’s it’. She said, ‘I expect to go through at least 10
or 12 more.’” The play wasn’t due for unleashing until next year. Then one
morning — they were rehearsing Lear — Goold and Ben Power, his associate
director at Headlong, came in and said, “The world’s falling apart
financially. We’ve got a play nearly ready about that. Let’s get it on.”
Enron works not only because it is timely, however. It also brings out to best
effect yet Headlong’s hyper-theatrical house style. Its grab bag of
storytelling tools includes mime, song and dance, puppetry, lightsabre
fights and screen trickery. There are also brilliant performances, from an
ensemble playing everyone from “the Lehman Brothers”, who are conjoined
twins, to lowly office toilers. With creepy relish, Samuel West gives the
performance of his life as Jeffrey Skilling, the ultimately tragic little
jumped-up Übermensch whose ruse it is to float Enron on a sea of cleverly
concealed debt.
It’s amazing to report that Enron started life as a musical. “Lucy maybe wrote
the sort of play that she thought we would produce well,” Goold recalls. “It
was bonkers theatrical. It was too much. We said, ‘This is a Marlovian
story. It’s the over-reacher. It’s got to feel like Doctor Faustus or
Tamburlaine’, and we applied fairly formal constraints for her to work
through. We were very aware we had something that could be fantastic. And we
wanted to make sure.”
He wanted to make equally sure with ENO. They offered him several operas
before he plumped for Turandot. In Puccini’s unfinished final opera, the
titular Chinese princess beheads all suitors who fail in the trial she sets
them, until Calaf, a visiting prince, accepts the challenge despite the
entreaties of Liu, the slave girl who loves him. “Everyone kept saying to
me, ‘The only way you can do Turandot is with a huge production, and you’re
crazy to do it at the ENO, who don’t have the resources of the Royal Opera
House.’ I suppose I’m attracted to climbing the mountain a bit.”
It’s not his first opera. In the 1990s, before anyone had heard of him, he was
twice invited to direct little-known pieces for the Tuscan music festival at
Batignano. He went back again in 2004. That was where John Berry of ENO
first came across him. “It’s hard to define what it is about somebody’s work
that you think can transfer from the theatre,” says Berry. “You just have to
go on a hunch. But I remember thinking he has great theatrical flair and
focus.” Goold has also directed at Garsington. But the Coliseum is a whole
new level.
It won’t surprise anyone who knows of Goold’s fondness for technological bells
and whistles that he’ll be doing Puccini his way. It may propel a shiver
down a traditional spine or two that he considered having Calaf deliver
Nessun dorma (“None shall sleep” in the English version) while having a
queasy night of prematch nerves on the loo. When pressed, Goold reveals that
he doesn’t really have China on his mind — Puccini never went there, after
all. “And I’ve always found that really problematic, that you can go and see
a big chorus pretending to be from 17th-century Baghdad and you see a bunch
of middle-aged white people. All the Turandots I’ve seen either look like
some po-faced Mikado or a Kiss video with loads of scary oriental make-up. I
wanted to exploit that.” As for the lovers, where previous productions skate
over the fact that Turandot and Calaf are in their different ways
unsympathetic, “we’re trying to dig at that, rather than paper that over.
And look at what it means to have an unfinished art work”.
Of course, nothing gets Goold’s juices flowing more than the chance to rejig
an ending. His rethought fourth act of Six Characters provoked a unanimous
critical thumbs down. “But uniformly everyone I spoke to who came to see it
liked that section the best.” Then, this year, there was his debut at the
National Theatre, a revival of Priestley’s Time and the Conways. A screen
sequence bolted onto the finale provoked widespread bafflement. “I knew that
would happen, but I liked it. What annoyed me was a lot of critics said,
‘The acting is fantastic. The direction doesn’t rehabilitate the play.’ I
thought that was churlish. It probably wasn’t quite the play I thought it
might be. But it made me think, ‘Oh f***, just do the stuff you’re
interested in.’ So then one does think, ‘Well, what is the default setting?’”
Goold might have known he was going to be a director when he played with his
toy soldiers as a north London schoolboy. “My little son likes fighting with
them, whereas I liked rearranging them.” He grew up worshipping at the altar
of Trevor Nunn, whose crowd control in RSC Shakespeare and big West End
musicals alike is unsurpassed. “There are two things as a director that you
can’t really learn: composition and rhythm. Whatever else one may think
about Les Mis as a piece of musical theatre, the stagecraft is exceptional.”
Perhaps the luxuriant dark locks are an unconscious tribute.
Goold graduated from Cambridge, like many a directorial wunderkind before him
(Hall, Nunn, Hytner, Mendes), in 1994 and was assisting at the Donmar a year
later. He did a longer apprenticeship out of town, first as an associate in
the late 1990s in Salisbury, then as artistic director in Northampton.
Within a year of leaving in 2005 he was directing Stewart in The Tempest at
Stratford. Within another year he had lured Jessica Lange into The Glass
Menagerie in the West End. And then the relationship began with Chichester.
By then, he and Power had taken over Oxford Stage Company, changed its name
to Headlong and started developing work. Next up, they’re doing Gulliver’s
Travels, as well as filming Macbeth.
The artistic policy is open-ended. “We’re interested in plays that aren’t
afraid of ideas, argument. We want people to leave a Headlong show with
plenty to talk about, for better or worse, shows that are self-consciously
theatrical and embrace all the things theatre can do. It’s no more than
that.” Enron is the completest embodiment yet of that ethos. As the awards
season comes around, Goold should be as confident as Calaf predicting his
climactic triumph: Vincero!
Turandot, Coliseum, WC2, from Thu; Enron, Royal Court, SW1, until Nov 7,
then Noël Coward, WC2, from Jan 16, 2010; Six Characters in Search of an
Author, Bristol Old Vic, until Sat, then touring until Nov 14
Your Comments
Order By: